Monday, March 25, 2013

This is one of King’s shorter works. Only 264 pages in the paperback I
read. Unfortunately, it takes King 100 pages to figure out whose story he’s
telling.

Trisha
rebuckled the pack’s flap before she could weaken, then wrapped her arms around
it again. Now that she wasn’t thirsty anymore, what should she imagine? And she
knew, just like that. She imagined Tom Gordon was in the clearing with her,
that he was standing right over there by the stream. Tom Gordon in his home
uniform; it was so white it almost glowed in the moonlight. Not really guarding
her because he was just pretend…but sort of guarding her. Why not? It was her
make-believe, after all.

Trisha is a nine-year-old girl who has gotten lost in the woods, and
has been listening to a Red Sox baseball game on her Walkman to keep her from
being too frightened. Tom Gordon is a closing pitcher for the Red Sox, and her favorite
player.

What was
that in the woods? she asked him.

She’s been seeing things in the woods—scary things; and is uncertain if
they are real or just in her imagination.

Don’t
know, Tom replied. He sounded indifferent. Of course he could afford to sound
indifferent, couldn’t he? The real Tom Gordon was two hundred miles away in
Boston, and by now probably asleep behind a locked door.

“How do
you do it?” she asked, sleepy again now, so sleepy she wasn’t aware that she
was speaking out loud. “What’s the secret?”

Secret of
what?

“Of
closing,” Trisha said, her eyes closing.

She
thought he would say believing in God—didn’t he point to the sky every time he
was successful, after all?—or believing in himself, or maybe trying your best
(that was the motto of Trisha’s soccer coach: “Try your best, forget the rest”),
but Number 36 said none of those things as he stood by the little stream.

You have
to try to get ahead of the first hitter, was what he said. You have to
challenge him with that first pitch, throw a strike he can’t hit. He comes to
the plate thinking, I’m better than this guy. You have to take that idea away
from him, and it’s best not to wait. It’s best to do it right away. Establishing
that it’s you who’s better, that’s the secret of closing.

This comes on page 103, and it is both the moral of the story, and the
first time I believe that Trisha is actually a nine-year-old girl.

Up to that point, you see, King doesn’t treat her like any
nine-year-old girl I ever heard of. Or maybe he tries to, but her inner voice
and the voice of the narrator are so intertwined and can’t tell them apart.

…when she
got to be Pete’s age her face would probably be one great pimple if she didn’t
lay off the sweets…

…she now
looked back on her panicky plunge through the woods with the mixture of
indulgence and embarrassment adults feel when looking back upon the worst of
their childhood behavior…

…it had been a crappy day, all right, très crappy…

…her pack, of which she had hardly been aware up until now, began to
feel like a large, unstable baby in one of those papoose carriers…

…at last, moving as wearily as a woman of sixty after a hard day’s
work (she felt like a woman of sixty after a hard day’s work)…

These are all in the narrator’s
voice—in the sense that they are not direct quotations attributed to Trisha or
italicized words to depict Trisha’s actual thoughts—but they are all so close
to Trisha’s point of view, and, to my way of thinking, so obviously connections
and language that an adult mind would employ, that they really prevented me
from getting into the story and seeing Trisha as King undoubtedly wanted me to
see her—as a frightened nine-year-old girl in a whole lot of trouble. What did
I see instead? I saw Stephen King, the aging novelist who has written one too
many books that rely on the same narrative arc pretending to be a nine-year-old
girl.

Here’s the absolute epitome.

She got moving again. Three quarters of the way down, a bug—a big
one, not a minge or a mosquito—flew into her face. It was a wasp, and Trisha
batted at it with a cry. Her pack shifted violently to her downhill side, her
right foot slipped, and suddenly her balance was gone. She feel, hit the rock
slope on her shoulder with a tooth-rattling thud, and began to slide.

“Oh shit on toast!” she cried, and grabbed the ground.

Oh shit on toast? That’s what a
nine-year-old girl who’s lost in the woods says when she loses her footing and
begins sliding down a rocky hill? Oh shit on toast?

King does sporadically use a technique
that helps, putting the thoughts and expressions that more appropriately belong
to adults in the echoed voices of adults Trisha knows.

…Of course, if pigs had wings, bacon would fly. Her father said that…

…At least she wasn’t going to die from the stings, or she’d probably
be dying already. She had overheard Mom and Mrs. Thomas from across the street
talking about someone who was allergic to stings, and Mrs. Thomas had said,
“Ten seconds after it gut im, poor ole Frank was swole up like a balloon. If he
hadn’t had his little kit with the hyperdermic, I guess he woulda choked to
death…”

But he does this far too infrequently
to make Trisha’s constant flashes of King’s own vernacular adult wisdom
believable. It really was the most distracting part of the first hundred pages.

The second hundred pages are better,
and I especially liked the climax, where Trisha confronts and defeats a wild
bear—blurred by her disorientation after a few days of hunger and dehydration
and King’s typical storytelling tricks—into perhaps a malevolent entity called
the God of the Lost, by pitching her Walkman at it in classic Tom Gordon style
and bopping it right on the nose. Tom’s lesson—that you have to take the
thought that your opponent is better than you away from him as quickly as you
can—comes full circle in a nice and fulfilling way.

And in this regard, I realize that Trisha
has to be a nine years old in order for the story to work. She can’t be
anything else. Can you imagine an adult, lost in the woods, conjuring up a
projection of his favorite baseball player to be his guardian and pathfinder in
a time of desperation?

King never tries to convince us that
Tom Gordon is actually with Trisha in the woods. He knows better than anyone
that it isn’t really Gordon that’s protecting her. It is Trisha’s child-like
sense of hero worship that gives her the courage to push forward and do what
she does. And given the themes King has written about so many times before,
that is a concept worthy of his narrative gifts.